American Avatar: The United States in the Global Imagination
Author: BARRY A. SANDERS Since September 11, 2001, the extensive literature on the United Statess image abroad, by popular pundits and academics alike, leaves the reader with a false impression that foreigners views of America are normally negative and impervious to change. In fact they are complex, emotional, frequently internally contradictory, and often change quickly. Barry A. Sanders corrects this misimpression with a rigorous and insightful textual analysis of the roots of peoples views of the United States and what can be done to alter them. According to Sanders, the attitudes a person expresses about the United States consist of two separate components: the persons memory bank of images (informed by American geography, people, philosophy, history, and foreign policy) and a predisposition or bias that influences which images are called forth from memory.Opinion surveys, such as the Pew Global Attitude Survey, only record the spoken result of this twostep process in their tabulation of favorable or unfavorable comments. They necessarily fail to see the underlying complexity. Examining the biases or predispositions that guide people in selecting among the myriad stored images to express an opinion on a given day, Sanders analyzes both anti-American and pro-American biases but focuses on the former, explaining which criticisms should be heeded when crafting foreign policy and communicating national objectives to friends and foes alike.
Author: H. A. Halliday
A chronological listing of significant events in the evolution of Canadian military aviation from 1883 to 1974, including the significance of individual achievements of the many men and women who contributed to its development.
Author: Giovanni Capoccia
How does a democracy deal with threats to its stability and continued existence when those threats come from political parties that play the democratic game? In Defending Democracy, political scientist Giovanni Capoccia studies key European nations between World Wars I and II which survived such democratic crises. A comprehensive and thoughtful historical analysis of the democracies of interwar Europe, Defending Democracy provides a unique perspective on the many lessons to be learned from their successes and failures. With this exclusively empirical investigative approach, Capoccia develops a methodology for analyzing contemporary democraciessuch as Algeria, Turkey, Israel, and otherswhere similar political conditions are present. Given the rise of terrorism and the persistence of extremism in both established and new democracies today, continued research and dialogue on the defense of democracy are necessary for its preservation.
Author: By E. Ann Matter
The Song of Songs, eight chapters of love lyrics found in the collection of wisdom literature attributed to Solomon, is the most enigmatic book of the Bible. For thousands of years Jews and Christians alike have preserved it in the canon of scripture and used it in liturgy. Exegetes saw it as a central text for allegorical interpretations, and so the Song of Songs has exerted an enormous influence on spirituality and mysticism in the Western tradition.In the Voice of My Beloved, E. Ann Matter focuses on the most fertile moment of Song of Songs interpretation: the Middle Ages. At least eighty Latin commentaries on the text survive from the period. In tracing the evolution of these commentaries, Matter reveals them to be a vehicle for expressing changing medieval ideas about the church, the relationship between body and soul, and human and divine love. She shows that the commentaries constitute a well-defined genre of medieval Latin literature. And in discussing the exegesis of the Song of Songs, she takes into account the modern exegesis of the book and feminist critiques of the theology embodied in the text.
Author: Edited by Nancy Gonlin and Jon C. Lohse
The best treatment of the subject matter to date.Marcello A. Canuto, Yale University Were most commoners in ancient Mesoamerica poor? In a material sense, yes, probably so. Were they poor in their beliefs and culture? Certainly not, as Commoner Ritual and Ideology in Ancient Mesoamerica demonstrates. This volume explores the ritual life of Mesoamerica's common citizens, inside and outside of the domestic sphere, from Formative through Postclassic periods. Building from the premise that ritual and ideological expression inhered at all levels of society in Mesoamerica, the contributors demonstrate that ideology did not emanate solely from exalted individuals and that commoner ritual expression was not limited to household contexts. Taking an empirical approach to this under-studied and under-theorized area, contributors use material evidence to discover how commoner status conditioned the expression of ideas and values. Revealing complex social hierarchies that varied across time and region, this volume offers theoretical approaches to commoner ideology, religious practice, and sociopolitical organization and builds a framework for future study of the correlation of ritual and ideological expression with social position for Mesoamericanists and archaeologists worldwide.
Author: Lily Chumley
The last three decades have seen a massive expansion of China's visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion. New ideologies of creativity and creative practices have reshaped the training of a new generation of art school graduates. Creativity Class is the first book to explore how Chinese art students develop, embody, and promote their own personalities and styles as they move from art school entrance test preparation, to art school, to work in the country's burgeoning culture industries. Lily Chumley shows the connections between this creative explosion and the Chinese government's explicit goal of cultivating creative human capital in a new market socialist economy where value is produced through innovation.Drawing on years of fieldwork in China's leading art academies and art test prep schools, Chumley combines ethnography and oral history with analyses of contemporary avant-garde and official art, popular media, and propaganda. Examining the rise of a Chinese artistic vanguard and creative knowledge-based economy, Creativity Class sheds light on an important facet of today's China.
Author: Edited by Earle V. Bryant
A writer perhaps best known for the revolutionary works Black Boy and Native Son, Richard Wright also worked as a journalist during one of the most explosive periods of the 20th century. From 1937 to 1938, Wright turned out more than two hundred articles for the Daily Worker--the newspaper that served as the voice of the American Communist Party. Byline, Richard Wright, edited by Earle V. Bryant, assembles more than one hundred of those articles plus two of Wrights essays from New Masses, revealing to readers the early work of an American icon.
Author: Christine E. Tulley
In How Writing Faculty Write, Christine Tulley examines the composing processes of fifteen faculty leaders in the field of rhetoric and writing, revealing through in-depth interviews how each scholar develops ideas, conducts research, drafts and revises a manuscript, and pursues publication. The book shows how productive writing faculty draw on their disciplinary knowledge to adopt attitudes and strategies that not only increase their chances of successful publication but also cultivate writing habits that sustain them over the course of their academic careers. The diverse interviews present opportunities for students and teachers to extrapolate from the personal experience of established scholars to their own writing and professional lives.
Author: Robert A. Packenham
In Europe after World War II, U.S. economic aid helped to ensure economic revival, political stability, and democracy. In the Third World, however, aid has been associated with very different tendencies: uneven political development, violence, political instability, and authoritarian rule in most countries.Despite these differing patterns of political change in Europe and the Third World, however, American conceptions of political development have remained largely constant: democracy, stability, anti-communism. Why did the objectives and theories of U.S. aid officials and social scientists remain largely the same in the face of such negative results and despite the seeming inappropriateness of their ideas in the Third World context?Robert Packenham believes that the thinking of both officials and social scientists was profoundly influenced by the Liberal Tradition and its view of the American historical experience. Thus, he finds that U.S. opposition to revolution in the Third World steins not only from perceptions of security needs but also from the very conceptions of development that arc held by Americans. American pessimism about the consequences of revolution is intimately related to American optimism about the political effects of economic growth. In his final chapter the author offers some suggestions for a future policy.Originally published in 1977.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Frederick S. Starr
The turbulent period of renewal and innovation that followed Russia's crushing defeat in the Crimea has been interpreted, historically, in terms of the emancipation of the serfs and the evolution of the gentry class. But, contends Frederick Starr, such an approach underestimates the breadth and intensity of the impulse for local reforms per se. After tracing the ideological sources of the reform, Mr. Starr examines in detail the legislative process by which administrative decentralization and public self-government were instituted.Originally published in 1972.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.